The Schwartz Report

Adobe Shuns Windows Store for Its Creative Cloud

One of the keys to success for Microsoft's Windows Store effort will be getting major traditional software players to develop new modern apps. If you're expecting to see Adobe's Dreamweaver or Photoshop as an app in the Windows Store, that's not in the cards. And it's not because Adobe is ignoring the shift to mobility.

Adobe's move to go all cloud earlier this year (its software model moved from offering one-time license fees to subscription-based software as a service) gave little room to offer its wares in an app store. Adobe believes its new Creative Cloud is the best path to supporting mobile devices as well as traditional PCs and Macs.

I reached out to Adobe recently to see if it had any plans to offer any of its apps in the Windows Store and a spokesman said no. "The latest versions of Adobe's creative pro offerings are available only through Creative Cloud," he said. "We do not have any current plans to release CC tools outside Creative Cloud."

When Adobe announced it will force users of its design, Web development and marketing tools from perpetual one-time licenses to cloud-based subscriptions back in May, customers were outraged. But the move doesn't seem to have hurt the company, which yesterday reported it has 1.44 million subscriptions. That surpassed expectations of just 1.25 million subscriptions.

The way the company looks at it, it has blown past its forecast, thanks to higher-than-anticipated adoption by enterprise customers, CEO Shantanu Narayen told CNBC this morning following yesterday's fiscal fourth quarter and year-end earnings report. At the same time, revenues for the quarter ($1.04 billion) were down 9.7%. Year-end revenue of $4.1 billion was down 6.8% from $4.4 billion.

Adobe stock was trading 5% higher this morning, apparently on investors' beliefs that the company's Creative Cloud transition is working for Adobe. "Adobe employees have embraced the cloud as a much better canvas in order to do their innovation," Narayen told CNBC. "I think it's not just Adobe, but you'll find every single packaged software company embrace and adopt the cloud."

Looking at the company's results, some analysts now say Adobe is "leading the charge" to the cloud in terms of mainstream ISVs who have made a wholesale shift to the cloud. That said, does the absence of Adobe apps in the Windows Store make Windows tablets less appealing to those who live in the Adobe universe? Or are Windows 8 tablets still suitable for use as with Web-based SaaS solutions from Adobe, Salesforce.com and others, in addition to Windows Store apps?